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Help:Editing
Absolute beginners? If you can type and click, you can edit most pages on this wiki. #'Find a page to improve'. (If you want, you can practice in the Sandbox first. It's there for "practicing", or experimenting with almost anything. It's a good place to get used to how the wiki works.) #'Click "Edit this page"'. #An "edit box" will open - type your new sentences or corrections (just like MS or Lotus or WordPerfect wordprocessing) #'Click the "Save" button' - (well, it may be wise to hit the "Preview" button first, in case of mistakes!) #'You're now a Web Publisher. Welcome to the team! :D' More detail As with all wikis, you can edit any non-protected page on this Wikia. Your changes will be visible immediately. Just click the "edit" link that appears near the top of every page. Explain your edit in the "Summary" box between the edit window and the save and preview buttons. eg: "typo" or "added info on xyz". Use the "Show preview" button to check your edit and get the formatting right before saving. Remember to Save page before moving on. If you are logged in, you can mark an edit as minor by checking the This is a minor edit box to let people know your edit is not something substantive. To try editing, open a new window and go to the Sandbox (which is an editing test area), and then click the "edit" link. Add something and click save. Formatting Most text formatting is usually done with wiki markup, so you don't have to learn HTML. Bold and italics Bold and italics are added by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('): *''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on each side) *'bold' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on each side) *''bolded italics'' is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on each side) Headings and subheadings Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up your article by inserting a heading for each section. Headings can be created like this: * Main heading (2 equals signs) * Subheading (3 equals signs) * Another level down (4 equals signs) * Another level down (5 equals signs) If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents (TOC) will be automatically generated. Try creating some headings in the Sandbox and see the effect on the TOC. Indenting To indent text, place a colon (:) right at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph. For example: This is aligned all the way to the left. ::This is indented slightly. :::This is indented more. is shown as: This is aligned all the way to the left. :This is indented slightly. ::This is indented more. Bullet points To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*). Similar to rectal indentation, more asterisks in front of a paragraph means more indentation. A brief example: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Which is shown as: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Numbered lists You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol (#). Using more #s will affect the level of indenting. Example: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Shows up as: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Links Links are important on wikis to help readers navigate your site. Internal links You can extensively cross-reference wiki pages using internal links. You can add links to existing titles, and also to titles you think ought to exist in future. To make a link to another page on the same wiki, just put the title in double square brackets. For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Main Page, it would be: :Main Page If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can add an alternative name by adding it after a pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards). For example, if you wanted to make a link to the Main Page, but wanted it to say "home page" you would write it as such: :View the home page... It would appear as: :View the home page... When you want to use the plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets. For example, you would write: :Add questions to the Wikia for quizzes. It would appear as: :Add questions to the Wikia for quizzes. (the link will be red if this page does not yet exist) Interwiki links To link to another Wikia, you can use its title followed by a colon and the article name, instead of using the full URL. For example, the Creatures Wiki home page is at Creatures:Main Page, which can be typed as :Creatures:Main Page :rather than as http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page This style of link works for any wiki in the interwiki map, not just for Wikia. See the Central Wikia page at Wikia:Help:Interwiki link. External links If you want to link to a site outside of Wikia, you may just type the full URL for the page you want to link to. :http://www.google.com/ It is often more useful to make the link display something other than the URL, so use one square bracket at each end, with the alternative title after the full URL address, separated by a space (not a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as Google search engine, just type: :Google search engine Redirects To redirect automatically from one page to another, type #REDIRECT and then put in brackets the name of the page to be redirected to. For example, you could redirect from "Cats" to "Cat". That way, anyone typing either version in the search box will automatically go to "Cat". Wiki variables and templates Use to see the current Wikia. For instance, on this site prints out as . That and a few other templates are common to MediaWiki sites. Check the current list of all templates on this Wikia. You can create templates. After you create the page Template:XXX, using the command will include that content in your current page. So, if you have something that needs to be included on many other pages, you might want to use a template. Most templates available on the Central Wikia can be used on individual wikia with just "wikia:" prefixed to the name. See the help page on Central at Wikia:Help:Shared templates. Maintenance templates Stub Stub is the most used maintenance template on the wiki. As of writing this blog, there are 518 pages under Article stubs. Yes, 518 pages. The wiki could certainly use more content, I do not contend this fact, but with such a massive quantity of pages there, it isn't very helpful to anyone who might be trying to work on stub articles. Firstly, an article that doesn't exist should never be created with nothing but a stub template simply because it is redlinked. This is akin to vandalism. Any pages with virtually no actual content should either be expanded immediately or marked for deletion, not stubbed. Make use of the multiple sub-stub templates. These include: * — if the article is about an item * — if the article is about a location * — if the article is about a monster * — if the article is about a character * — if the article is about a skill If a section is missing, there is a sub-stub template for that too: * The generic template should only be used if the article does not fit into any of the subcategories listed above. It also should be used for missing content, not poorly written content. Cleanup The opposite of Stub, should only be used for poorly written articles, not missing content. NoImage The template should not be added to any article that doesn't have an image, only an article that doesn't have an image and feels incomplete without one. Categories Template-added categories Many templates add categories when placed into articles. If you are using templates, you should know what categories it is adding (if any). If a template adds a category, do not add the same category to the page. The only exception is if the article in question needs the be listed in a certain order on the category page, if you don't know what this means or how to do this, then this exception does not exist for you. There is a reason why templates add categories, and it's not just to save space, if categories need to be changed at a later time, changing the one template is much easier than changing the 20 pages that use it individually. If every page in a navigation template is using the same category, the template should be adding them. If the template is not already adding them, there might be a good reason why it is not, so don't be in a great hurry to start adding new categories to templates. Category hierarchy To make navigation easier, categories have subcategories, and subcategories have even more subcategories. This is the category hierarchy. Do not add an entire hierarchy to an article's categories. This is redundant and defeats the purpose in having subcategories. If category C is a subcategory of B and B is a subcategory of A, then an article that is relevant to A, B, and C should only be using C. Editing